Trumpet player Dennis Szymanski, 18, left, blows his horn during a break from UAlbany Marching Great Danes band practice on Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2013, at UAlbany in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union)

The University at Albany football team's home opener Sept. 14 heralds a new season, in a new stadium, in a new conference. The place will be packed with Great Danes fans, the scent of burgers from parking lot tailgates still hanging in the air, and she'll finally live a dream.

To wear a marching band uniform.

"I've always wanted to be in that uniform on the field in the big hat," says the freshman bass clarinet player.

UAlbany's decision to create a marching band this season was part of its move to the more competitive Colonial Athletic Association and an effort to raise its sports profile with a 8,500-seat purple-and-gold stadium sitting front-and-center in the campus landscape. If you want to be a legit big-time football school, you need a marching band as much as a good stable of running backs. And if the fall unrolls as it should, home games will sell out, and the place will rock with football tradition.

The university was willing to invest at least $100,000 for instruments and uniforms to get the ideal college football experience.

While the UAlbany Pep Band used to keep the stands warm with "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye," it wasn't the same as a field decorated at halftime with lock-step precision and a brass section blaring the theme song from James Bond's "Skyfall."

"It's going to really improve everything," says Preston Coppage, the color guard director and a UAlbany junior. "It's going to improve morale at the games and bring more attention to the arts."

And we thought this was just about game-day atmosphere.

The call for band members earlier this year sounded like a disaster in the making. UAlbany marching band director Kevin Champagne didn't know what the interest level would be from students and was willing to take anyone with the will to play, even if the aspiring band member didn't know a baritone from a tuba. Instead, UAlbany struck a chord, stumbling onto a student recruiting tool.

Band kids want to go to colleges with marching bands.

They want to bake in the sun for a weeklong band camp, practicing gate turns and rolling off their heels. They want, like freshman baritone player Joe Riccardi, who marched competitively in high school, to keep the band geek streak alive.

"When I picked this school, I was kind of upset because they didn't have (a marching band)," he says. "At orientation, my dad passed an information table saying they were starting a marching band, and I jumped right in."

Champagne says about 100 students expressed interest in the band, and they'll have about 50 musicians when the season starts, as well as a color guard. Aside from still waiting for the coveted uniforms to come in, Champagne says the effort is going "almost surprisingly well."

Months ago, he was hoping for a serviceable field show come the home opener. But by the sounds of things off Western Avenue on Wednesday, football fans might be in for a musical treat.

As band members wished for drinking water on the grassy field by UAlbany's tennis courts, head football coach Bob Ford pulled over in his golf cart to listen to the marching drills.

"They add a great deal of excitement," says Ford, who added that James Madison University's marching band, which he coincidentally traveled with once, fills seven buses. "And there are some levels (of college football) where people go to games to see the band."

Maybe that will be the case someday at UAlbany, where kids are already choosing to be Great Danes simply because they have one.